CHART OF THE DAY: Suddenly, LinkedIn Is A Traffic Firehose

Out of nowhere, Business Insider started seeing real
referral traffic from LinkedIn last month.The chart below illustrates
the spike.

LinkedIn product manager Liz Walker tells us the traffic is
coming from a bunch of sources – mostly new products like
LinkedIn.com/Today, newsletters, and LinkedIn News.

All of these sources are programmed by LinkedIn populated
"inShares," which are kind of like Facebook "likes" or Twitter "re-tweets."

Who knew?

Google, by the way, is trying to pull of a
similar trick with its +1 button. Larry Page is obsessed with figuring out
social. He's worried about how people are finding content in
their Facebook News Feeds and Twitter streams before they ever
think to Google search for it. Maybe he should worry about
Linkedin, too.
Maybe he should just buy LinkedIn.